Monday, 8 October 2007

Politicians, speechwriters and political commentators seldom attempt this; it’s much less trouble to recycle debased currency.

Effective and memorable adjective-and-noun combinations are very rare in political writing, which is generally clipped together like Lego from such things as radical policies and progressive agendas, so it is refreshing to come across two of them in one piece of commentary. Yesterday Tom Hamilton, in a coolly contemptuous post in his blog Let's Be Sensible, came up with these exemplars: tone-deaf right-wingery and inane vacuity.

He was, of course, writing about the speeches at the Conservative Party Conference.